Tuesday, 24 January 2012 13:11 Jaap van der Meer (TAUS)
Review of Nicholas Ostler’s book The Last Lingua Franca
The glorious future of machine translation has an avid supporter - Nicholas Ostler, historian of world languages, President of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, and author of The Last Lingua Franca.
Following his fascinating and erudite review of the rise and fall of such world languages as Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Greek and Latin, Ostler’s new book leaves very little hope that English will maintain its dominant position in the modern world for much longer. Not because of strong competition from another language, but because of the growing linguistic diversity of the internet.
Between 2000 and 2009, Arabic on the internet grew twentyfold, Chinese x20, Portuguese x9, Spanish X7 and French x6, while content in English ‘only’ tripled. Proportionally, then, English is declining in importance relatively quickly. “The main story of growth on the Internet … is of linguistic diversity, not concentration.”